Close Read: The Torture Bust

Is torture good business? Today’s Timeslooks at the strange careers of Drs. Jim Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, who found the C.I.A. to be an “excellent customer” for their interrogation services. The strange part is that neither Mitchell nor Jessen knew much about interrogations—neither had ever conducted one or had any scholarship in the area—or about Al Qaeda. But Mitchell did impress officials in the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorist Center with “his combination of visceral toughness and psychological jargon.” Isn’t the C.I.A. smarter than that?

Mitchell and Jessen’s big idea was taking SERE training, which was developed after the Korean War, when “false confessions by American prisoners led to sensational charges of communist ‘brainwashing,’ ” on the theory that “giving service members a taste of Chinese-style interrogation would prepare them to withstand its agony.” (See Jane Mayer’s 2005 piece “The Experiment” for more on the uses of SERE.) Perhaps you can come up with a logic equation in which knowledge of how our enemies elicit false confessions from us equals knowledge of how to get true confessions from our enemies—actually, you really can’t. As is now well known, the F.B.I. got good information from Abu Zubaydah without torturing him; when Mitchell and Jessen “turned up the pressure”—“Mr. Zubaydah was confined in a box, slammed into the wall and waterboarded 83 times”—they didn’t. But all was not lost:

The business plans of Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Jessen, meanwhile, were working out beautifully. They were paid $1,000 to $2,000 a day apiece, one official said…. At the Ritz-Carlton in Maui in October 2003, [Mitchell] was featured at a high-priced seminar for corporations on how to behave if kidnapped. He created new companies, called Wizard Shop, later renamed Mind Science, and What If….

In 2005, the psychologists formed Mitchell Jessen and Associates, with offices in Spokane and Virginia and five additional shareholders, four of them from the military’s SERE program. By 2007, the company employed about 60 people, some with impressive résumés, including Deuce Martinez, a lead C.I.A. interrogator of [Khalid Sheikh] Mohammed; Roger L. Aldrich, a legendary military survival trainer; and Karen Gardner, a senior training official at the F.B.I. Academy.

The company’s C.I.A. contracts are classified, but their total was well into the millions of dollars. In 2007 in a suburb of Tampa, Fla., Dr. Mitchell built a house with a swimming pool, now valued at $800,000.

And today? The C.I.A. “abruptly terminated” its contracts with Mitchell Jessen last spring, and its offices, in “a handsome century-old building in downtown Spokane,” now “sit empty”:

The phones were disconnected, and at neighboring businesses, no one knew of a forwarding address.

So the torture boom was followed by a torture bust—that, at least, is reasonably good news.

The business of the torturer is as much (or more) to get people to lie as it is to get at the truth—that much is clear from a BBC “Newsnight” interview with Ikram Yakubov, an Uzbek defector who says that, as an intelligence officer, he was “in the room” many times when people were tortured, often to elicit false confessions. (“A lot of people have been killed due to torture with hot water.”) His career was destroyed, he says, when he sent an indiscreet report to Islam Karimov, Uzbekistan’s repressive ruler. (Karimov’s daughter recently made Foreign Policy’s “World’s Worst Daughters” list.)

The “Newsnight” report features Shahida Tulaganova, an Uzbek exile and journalist—see “My Fake Passports and Me,” her brilliant and darkly funny undercover report for the BBC, in which she sets out to acquire a forged or stolen passport for each and every E.U. country, and just about does.

It’s unclear what Yakubov wants, assuming he’s telling the truth—some sort of redemption, or just a safe haven. That brings us to Michael Vick. Tony Dungy is sure he’ll be signed any minute now; the latest news is that Vick’s been spotted at O’Hare. Is that good for Jay Cutler?

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